Governor Mitt Romney is pictured at one of the many round table meetings he's hosted across America for worried voters. Time and time again, major concerns revealed at these meetings are fixing our pitiful economy and ending America's massive debt spending.
(Photo taken at Galley Hatch in Hampton, New Hampshire on July 5, 2011.)

PRESIDENT OBAMA FAILS TO ACCEPT MORAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR HIS FAILED POLICIES

“President Obama confirmed today that he will continue his attacks on the free enterprise system, which Mayor Booker and other leading Democrats have spoken out against. What this election is about is the 23 million Americans who are still struggling to find work and the millions who have lost their homes and have fallen into poverty. President Obama refuses to accept moral responsibility for his failed policies. My campaign is offering a positive agenda to help America get back to work.”

4:37 p.m. ET: President Obama, at the NATO summit press conference, pits POLITICAL EQUITY against PRIVATE EQUITY: “My view of private equity is that it is, it is set up to maximize profits and that is a healthy part of the free market, of course. That’s part of the role of a lot of business people. That is not unique to private equity. … But understand their priority is to maximize profits, and that is not always going to be good for communities or businesses or workers. And the reason this is relevant to the campaign is that because my opponent, Gov. Romney, the main calling card for why he should be president is his business experience. He is not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts, he is saying, ‘I am a business guy and I know how to fix it,’ and this is his business. And when you are president as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot. … And so if your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you are missing what this job is about.”

Obama’s argument is silly. Governor Romney’s leadership at Bain Capital focused on people… how to save dying businesses, create jobs for people, and turn failure into personal success for them.

It is never a good day for a candidate when a prominent surrogate becomes the story and sucks all of the political oxygen out of the room. Cue Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker, whose comments Sunday on “Meet the Press” about negative campaigning has overshadowed all other political stories in the past 24 hours.
…
“This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides,” Booker said Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
“It’s nauseating to the American public. Enough is enough. Stop attacking private equity […] This stuff has got to stop because what it does is it undermines, to me, what this country should be focused on. It’s a distraction from the real issues. It’s either going to be a small campaign about this crap, or it’s going to be a big campaign, in my opinion, about the issues that the American public cares about.”

It wasn’t long until Booker was taken to the Obama wood shed:

It took only a matter of hours after his “Meet the Press” appearance before Booker put out a three-minute, 42-second You Tube video clarifying his remarks and endorsing the Obama campaign strategy to criticize Romney’s business record.

Booker said he decided to make the video because he “got so much feedback…” I’ll bet. Heads in the White House and Chicago must have exploded.

“Let me be clear, Mitt Romney has made his business record a centerpiece of his campaign,” Booker said in the straight to camera explanation. “He’s talked about himself as a job creator, and therefore it is reasonable, and therefore I encourage it, for the Obama campaign to examine that record and discuss it. I have no problem with that.”

Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt claims Booker wasn’t asked to make the video and the views Booker expressed in the video are his own. (The Obama Machine is depending on American gullibility and ignorance to pass off that bit of balderdash.)

…[Y]ou could see from Obama’s comments at the NATO press conference, that his campaign used the “Booker news cycle” to double down on their attacks on Romney and Bain.

And what seems to have been lost in the shuffle was that Booker would not back off his criticism of the negative tone of the campaign.

“I used the word nauseating on ‘Meet the Press,’ because that’s really how I feel when I see people in my city struggling with real issues and still feeling the challenges of this economy, and still looking for hope and opportunity and real specific plans,” Booker said. “I get very upset when I see such a level of dialogue.”

Gut Check conclusion:

The dialogue Booker bemoans had a presidential podium at an international news conference moments ago.

All this from a President who presides over the most onerous economic stagnation since the Great Depression, who has racked up nearly more debt than all other presidents combined, who hasn’t passed a federal budget since he’s been in office, and, at the same NATO summit, had the audacity to counsel struggling European nations to forget austerity measures and spend more money they don’t have.